Ch. 3: Oil Production and Air Quality in California

Data Exploration: Air Quality Data

Overview

This Rmarkdown notebook explores exposure data for Ch. 3 of my dissertation project. This study uses air quality and drilling from 1999 to 2019 across California.

Data sources

• California Air Resources Board - administrative shapefiles
• Enverus (formerly DrillingInfo) - well sites
• US EPA Air Quality System (AQS) - monitoring sites, air pollutant concentrations
• US Census Bureau - administrative shapefiles

For this project, we used data from 284 unique monitors from the AQS dataset. We obtained data on concentrations of four air pollutants from 1999 to 2019: CO, O3, NO2, PM10, PM2.5, and SO2. Note that not all monitors monitor all pollutants.

Air Quality Monitors

Map. Location of air quality monitors and oil fields

Map. Location of air quality monitors and air basins

We used data on 30886 well sites in preproduction and 92421 well sites in production in California during the study period (1999-2019). Note that these groups are not mutually exclusive. Well sites were most highly concentrated in the Central Valley and Southern California.

Map. Location of air quality monitors and well sites

The orange shaded area is a 5 km buffer around well sites in preproduction stage. The dark gray shaded area is a 5 km buffer around well sites in the production stage.

Distribution of Pollutant Concentrations

///// organize by pollutant? map monitors by pollutant?

Distribution of CO Concentrations

Distribution of N02 Concentrations

Distribution of Ozone Concentrations

Distribution of PM10 Concentrations

This distibution is right-skewed

Distribution of PM2.5 Concentrations

Distribution of SO2 Concentrations

Pollutant Concentrations by Month

CO Concentration by Month

NO2 Concentration by Month

Ozone Concentration by Month

PM10 Concentration by Month

PM2.5 Concentration by Month

SO2 Concentration by Month

Concentrations by Air Basin